Did you know it takes less than a second to decide if you want to get services from a website based on the way it looks? A proper veterinary website will give you a head start in the market and we will show you how to do it from scratch.
If you have a veterinary website design but aren’t getting enough customers, then you need to rethink your design sense.
Often, the layout of the website is discouraging to new users. It doesn’t send out a welcoming image of the brand. This can lead to frequent bounce rates as well. That is because there exists a communication gap between you and the pet owner looking for a vet.
You need to understand that website design for veterinary clinics has to be different than any other services website because your target audience is pet owners.
Pet owners feel very close to their pets and want them to be in the care of someone they can trust. Therefore you have to maintain a balance between a professional-looking veterinary practice website design along with resonating love and care for the pets you look after.
The Importance Of Veterinary Web Design
Your veterinary website is a means of communication between you and the pet owner. While designing your website, consider yourself as a pet owner. Look for the best veterinary website design with secure browsing, specific features, appropriate content organization, logos, and easy navigation features.
Only when you include these elements in your web layout, you can compel a pet owner towards your veterinary clinic or an animal hospital.
Instead of building it simply as a medium to generate more leads, consider building a veterinary website as a trust-building platform as well, and you’d be good to go.
What Elements Veterinary Website Designers Suggest Adding To Your Website?
Effective corporate website design is of critical importance to any website. However, it has to be tailored toward key demographics and audiences. That being said, for veterinary web design, the target audience is pet owners. For a professional-looking website, it’s always better to hire a web design agency for better performance and optimization.
Remember that your website has to look professional to captivate the audience. A new study reveals that it takes a person less than twenty seconds to form an opinion about your brand when they visit your website with 2.6 seconds to just respond at your website impression.
Just ask yourself whether your current veterinary website is giving the same impression, compelling others to respond to your CTA (Call To Action) within seconds.
There are hundreds of vets claiming to be the best. Therefore you need to make your website and your services stand out through the following designer recommended elements:
1. Navigation
Your viewers should know precisely where they are on your website. You should keep a user-friendly layout of the website so they can easily browse through the experiences of previous pets catered by you, testimonials, and the pet facilities that you provide.
You can also include a sitemap to enhance your site`s accessibility. Remember, the easier you’d make it for your viewer, the more likely they’ll trust you.
2. Visual Design
Your web design should be engaging through scrolling text animation to flash intros so it can impress the user.
As humans, we often feel positive towards what we can visually see and gauge. If your visual design brings out a sense of trust and leaves your customer-inspired, they’re likely to trust you and your services.
3. Content
Content is the backbone of your veterinary website. Poorly crafted content will make your customers question your authenticity and authority.
Therefore your website content should be informative, trustworthy, professional, and easy to read. The right type of website content is what signifies the importance of your veterinary website in the eyes of the user.
4. Interaction
User-friendly web design has to be engaging to retain your viewers while they navigate through your website. For instance, if they are looking for a specific breed that you have attended to in the past or your team of veterinarians.
5. Branding
Your veterinary website should be a complete reflection of what you offer. Your logo should make an instant connection with your veterinary services. Make sure that it is able to convey your message and reiterate your presence as a brand that cares for animals.
Also, branding has to be consistent. Every element of your veterinary website design should follow the same theme, colors, text, and visual graphics corresponding to your brand image.
A lack in branding or distorted branding can affect your overall authenticity and authority. Therefore, try and keep it consistent. A great way would be to make a brand book first to help you throughout the process.
6. Conversion
If you want your viewers actually to bring in their pets, get appointments. You have to introduce incentives, for instance, a discount to first-timers or special offers for specific breeds. That would enhance your conversion rate and bring in more and more customers with their pets.
7. Mobile Responsiveness
It’s 2020, and more than 90% of web users will be viewing your website through their mobile phones. Therefore you have to ensure mobile responsiveness. You can`t risk extended time with loading images and navigation errors.
What`s a must is to have a consistent veterinary website design across all mediums, if not, you are out of the game. Although to make yourself stand out, you can have an exclusive custom-built veterinary website design for mobile phones.
How to Build a Professional-Looking Veterinary Website?
Now that you are well acquainted with the elements of a professional-looking website. Here is a step by step process of how to design and build one.
To ensure that your veterinary website design is professional-looking and engaging enough for the viewers you need:
1. Contemporary And Professional Design
Your website design reflects your professionalism and credibility. Therefore your website design should be clean and professional. By looking at your website, the viewer should immediately gauge that you are a veterinary professional.
The veterinary website design should further retain continuity in design, color scheme, and content; and show images that depict the demographics you serve, as well as the animals/breeds you treat.
All of these elements of the design have to be aligned with your brand philosophy. Use the colors that are more likely to attract attention and are commonly associated with pets and care. For instance, the color Green has connotations with healing and nature. So, you can use this color to send out a similar message.
As an amateur in web development or a veterinary professional, you should consult different web design agencies that can cater to your specific needs. When it comes to the animals/breeds you treat, make your images are clear and depict exactly what you want.
2. Trust Building Elements
For a successful veterinary website, you need elements that garner trust between your veterinary website and the clients. Take it this way, you want others to entrust their beloved pets under your care.
They would like to know more about you as a person, that should be something more significant than a typical doctor`s bio. You can build this trust by adding your portfolio of work. You can also include your pictures with your pets (if you have any). That will allow them to see you as a caretaker as well.
Your veterinary website design should feature your bio, credentials, experience, pet preferences, career aspirations, including relevant photos to build a sense of trust. You have to be concise and pertinent to your personal information, education, hobbies, family, lifestyle, and the very reason why you decided to be a vet. It is essential to relay information about your veterinary staff along with their photos.
3. Testimonials and Reviews
One of the significant trust-building elements is testimonial and reviews. So, you need your previous customers to provide you with honest testimonials. They should not look too sales or promotional content.
Others would be delighted to hear from fellow pet owners about services. Trust building elements create a level of trust in potential clients.
You can also encourage your clients to review your veterinary website. These reviews can be beneficial for your website about potential customers and can further improve your website’s search engine ranking if provided with the right keywords.
4. Contact Pages
Your veterinary website design should have relevant contact details and areas to accommodate your clients. You need multiple ways for your clients to contact you, and the same should be visible on every page of your website.
There are numerous places to display your contact details. Preferably they should be at the upper right-hand corner of your website.
Remember that your website contact process should be effortless, a potential client won’t go to all that trouble just to contact you. If you`re using a contact form, make sure that your contact should provide a seamless experience.
Don`t allow your potential customers to undergo frustration and always provide CTA buttons. Some of the best examples of CTAs are the following:
- Call For Appointment Today
- Book Your Appointment Now
- Get A Free Quote Today
- Bring In Your Pet And get a 5% Discount.
With CTA buttons and contact pages, make sure that your messaging is bright enough for your potential clients to understand.
5. Coding
Regardless of your website content, you need to ensure proper coding and language optimization for your website, which you may not be able to do on your own. Therefore look for web design services as per your requirements.
You need a responsive design because modern-day algorithms prefer responsive websites and responsive mobile designs compared to non-responsive ones.
6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is perhaps one of the most critical elements for your veterinary website design. It is the only way to make your website design more accessible. With SEO, you can engage with potential clients who are looking for a vet in your vicinity for a particular breed or animal.
Similarly, you need a better ranking for your veterinary website because your potential clients won’t scroll any further after the first page. You have to make sure that your website is visible on the first page of search results to get more clients.
For better search engine optimization, you need the following:
To add your practice to local veterinary listings
The majority of the search engine listings are free, so you can easily add your website to different search engines. As a part of local business listings, your veterinary website will gain a competitive edge over your competitors. While listing your site, you need to come up with short phrases or words that users might enter into the search engine when looking for veterinarians or related services.
Create A Blog
A blog will enhance your website`s ability to attract more customers, where you have to optimize your veterinary website design to your blog.
A blog is a perfect way to create content and provide information regarding veterinary services as a profession.
If you can`t maintain your blog on your own, you can always hire freelance writers from different web design services to continuously add content to your website.
Use Backlinks
Backlinks, just like SEO, are integral to get more website traffic. One of the best ways to create backlinks is to partner up with different veterinary forums, both local and international, so you can generate in-bound and out-bound links with your website.
For instance, if there is a veterinary directory of your area or city, make sure it contains your URL and contact details.
Veterinary Website Design Trends
While designing your website, make sure that your website color, contents, images, all of them depict your area of specialization.
Use high definition images of breeds, animal types so that the customer can relate to your kind of service offerings. The following are the most in-demand breeds/animals/types that require veterinary services.
- Dogs
- Cats
- Horses
- Birds
- Exotic Animals
- Snakes
- Lizards
- Rabbits
- Rats
- Gerbils
- Hamsters
- Farm animals
You should list down all your vet credentials and experience separately because customers may want to look at your credentials and experience in a separate manner. Many customers looking for veterinary services are often not privy to relevant credentials.
Before moving on further, you can check out different veterinary website design trends such as:
1. Focus on your content
Like all other websites, web design services are evolving, making your veterinary website distinct; you have to focus on your content. Content is critical to reinforce all other design concepts and make your veterinary website design more holistic and aesthetically pleasing.
With content, you need to focus on why your customers are visiting your site. With that in mind, you have to provide useful information to your customers either through your blog or other website elements.
You have to design and deliver information in an intuitive and receptive manner. The fact that a pet owner is at your website shows that they can get useful information on your website.
You can try out different content organization mechanisms and layouts, but you can’t afford a customer losing interest in your site or getting frustrated.
2. Avoiding Visual Clutter (not too many images & pop-ups)
Although you need to incorporate different high definition images, you need to ensure that you don’t use too many images or the same breed, pop-ups, etc. For instance, if your viewer is reading a testimonial and an advertisement pop up appears, your customer will get frustrated.
You have to avoid visual clutter, low-resolution images, images that are difficult to navigate through. Your website doesn’t have to overachieve or try to lure in pet owners. You need to provide a holistic view of your veterinary services.
3. Speed Optimization
With an aesthetically pleasing and relatively clean website, your objective doesn’t end here. You have to optimize your website for speed by consulting digital marketing agencies.
If your website has more images and that takes too long to download, you are discouraging your customers from remaining on your website or clicking at your CTA.
Speed optimization becomes problematic when it comes to mobile accessibility with low internet speed and connectivity issues. You need to make you’re veterinary accessible from all available platforms.
4. Use Appropriate Design Elements
Your design elements should brighten things up with aesthetically pleasing colors, preferably matching your animal specialties, for instance, dark colors for horses, light colors for pets like cats and puppies, farm look for farm animals. These design elements play an essential role in others trying to gauge your veterinary services.
5. Vet Clinic vs. Animal Hospital
You have to differentiate between a vet clinic and an animal hospital, so your customers know about your specialized services. You can’t afford a bad review after a potential pet owner is turned away from your clinic just because of misinformation.
It’s possible to differentiate by using different images and showing your vet facilities. If you are adding an About Us section, make sure you clearly distinguish between what you offer.
A vet clinic veterinary website design may differ from an Animal hospital web design. You can always go through different successful veterinary websites.
List Of Professional & Trust Worthy Veterinary Websites
If you want to take veterinary website design inspiration, then here’s a list of the best veterinary website design. We’ve listed down their key features that help them stand out from the rest.
This should give you a headstart before creating your own website.
1. Clinica Dr. Mauro
Dr. Mauro`s clinic is an ideal veterinary practice for pet owners. Mauro`s website has an excellent potential for its brand promotion.
As soon as you log onto the site, you will be welcomed by a blissful video or pets, a dog, and a couple. The site itself is aesthetically pleasing and ensures that testimonials are engaging and captivating for the audience. The site uses a stick header for better navigation purposes and page optimization.
2. Bollington Veterinary
Bollington Veterinary website has an extraordinary website design where vets can look for inspiration. The site is clutter-free with well-organized elements.
Bollington uses a simple and straightforward design on the homepage with a refreshing and smooth animation upon scrolling. The header introduces the brand with video integration, a stunning pet image with a headline, and a brief description of the brand.
Bollington presents its content quite nicely with outstanding boxes.
3. Somers Animal Hospital
Somers Animal Hospital has a warm and welcoming homepage with a perpetual video background. They ensure that pet owners can set an appointment with ease through their veterinary website.
Additionally, their animation upon scrolling enhances the overall design and user-friendly aspect of the website. It would be more attractive for new clients to see reviews or testimonials of the recent customer’s experience with the brand.
The site never fails to impress them with such a new testimonials section.
4. Crescenta Canada Pet Hospital
Crescenta Canada Pet Hospital has a seamless and professional-looking website packed with essential elements. The animation upon the scrolling feature enhances the design and adds elegance to it.
While the high-quality, clear images are high for engagement, it has good typography and visual hierarchy pleasing for the viewers. The website ensures that all CTAs are attractive and provocative.
Other attractive and trust-building features include parallax effect, sticky menu, amazing hover effect, and video integration.
5. PetCure Oncology
PetCure Oncology has a stimulating website experience. It provides a calm and soothing effect with blue colors, shades of a blue, and a seamless experience.
The website has a simple homepage design with all essential features. PetCure oncology displays its articles, blogs, news with a slider, but as a user. You have the option to check all the news on the other pages.
PetCure also showcases pet heroes’ part in different clinical trials. This section allows the viewer to truly connect with the center and trust them with their pets as well. After all, who doesn’t love a little hero story?
6. BondVet
BondVet is a classic example of a website that uses multiple platforms to showcase its services using the Instagram feed, newsletter, testimonials, sticky menu, and more. The website magazines that featured its brand.
BondVet has a comprehensive and straightforward design. The sleek design helps in making the content look clutter-free. Moreover, the hero header looks delightful with a blissful scene of veterinary checkup accompanied by CTA and headline.
Key Takeaway
In the end, before you build your veterinary hospital website design, you have to know that no matter how great and optimized your vet website is, it should give a personal touch of your values as a vet and demonstrate your love for animals to attract customers.
You can’t afford the pet owner to feel alienated to distant from your vet facility, and the website has to reflect the trust-building elements.
You have to be truthful with your web design, display, and demonstrate what you can offer instead of artificial, hyped-up images or features from other designs.
If by any chance, you deceptively use pets of other vet clinics or try to forge on your veterinary website design, you will lose credibility to continue your services as a vet.
With an increase in animal owners, it is evident that they need care and attention, and a pet owner can only provide limited care to their pets. That is where they will need you and to trust you, your website has to reflect the best services and care for the animals.
